


Kazokuchou

by KayQy



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: Future Fic, Headcanon, OT3, Other, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 03:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7203854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayQy/pseuds/KayQy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both love Natsume deeply, but they also know that loving him isn’t enough to keep him from leaving them behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kazokuchou

**Author's Note:**

> Fell back down the Natsume Yuujinchou rabbit hole for a while, and started wondering just who, if anyone, I shipped Natsume with. Started jotting down my headcanon and of course it decided to morph into a ficlet partway through...

The thing is, both Taki and Tanuma love Natsume deeply, but they also know that loving him isn’t enough to keep Natsume from leaving them behind. All their adventures at school and with yokai have brought them all closer, but also highlight the fact that Natsume will always have one foot in another world, will always hold a part of him distant to protect those he cares about, and even if he returned their love the way they’d like him to, it wouldn’t be enough to tie him to this world, and they wouldn’t want to do that to him even if it did. And Natsume is too careful, even as he learns to open up little by little, to let someone’s happiness depend so wholly on him when he can’t promise to always be there. After knowing both loneliness and kindness, he hates even more the thought of leaving someone he loves alone. And Taki and Tanuma both understand this about him, so they don’t press too hard, they simply do their best to be there as much as he’ll allow.  
  
And perhaps Taki and Tanuma’s relationship with each other starts out as mutual consolation as they love and worry about Natsume together, but Tanuma admires Taki’s blunt kindness, and Taki likes Tanuma’s shy grace, and they never consider each other consolation prizes. Most people are only a little surprised when they start officially dating in senior year, and Natsume seems happy for them, which is both a relief and a bit of a disappointment, of course. So they have each other, and they have Natsume’s friendship and gradually growing trust, and it’s enough. Mostly.  
  
Except senior year brings not only new threats from yokai, but also from the exorcist community that Natsume rarely discusses with them. He couldn’t avoid them meeting Natori, who was strange but okay, but when that creepy Matoba confronts Taki and Tanuma separately with a polite smile and poison words, it leads to the biggest fight the three of them have ever had about trust and what they need to know, and even after they make up, they can feel Natsume pulling away again, increasing the distance he thinks he needs to keep others safe.  
  
It comes to a head just before graduation, after a day spent on a relatively harmless yokai adventure that Taki and Tanuma had nevertheless had to stumble into before Natsume would let them help. They end up in Tanuma’s room that evening, lying back and staring up at the pond reflections on the ceiling (or rather, two of them stare up at the reflections, while Taki squints and tries to picture what the boys described to her). Taki is using Tanuma’s stomach as a pillow, and Natsume looks over at them with a wistful sort of smile and says, “I’m so glad you two have each other.”  
  
Taki frowns, because something in Natsume’s tone is setting off warning bells in her gut, like this is more than just congratulations. “Thanks, but why are you saying that right now?”  
  
Natsume looks away. “Will you promise me something?”  
  
“What?” Tanuma asks warily.  
  
“If I have to… If I’m not here, will you take care of the Fujiwaras for me?”  
  
“Do you mean if you…” Taki can’t finish. “Is it really that dangerous?”  
  
“No! Not… Not like that,” Natsume says. “I just… don’t want them to be left alone if I have to…”  
  
“Natsume,” Tanuma says slowly, “you’re not only talking about getting killed by yokai, are you.”  
  
Natsume doesn’t answer. He just looks out at the pond only he can see.  
  
“Natsume,” Taki whispers. “Are you going to leave us?”  
  
“….I don’t want to, if I can avoid it,” Natsume finally whispers. “But if I have to…… I’ve received so much kindness since coming here, and meeting you and the Fujiwaras and everyone— so much more than I ever expected to find. And I’m so grateful, for everything, for everyone. So as long as I know that the people I… care about won’t be alone, I don’t—”  
  
Taki can’t take it anymore. She grabs Natsume’s shoulder and tugs him onto his back, then leans over and kisses him right on his stupid self-sacrificing mouth. “You idiot,” she says fiercely. “You think just because we love each other that we don’t need you too?”  
  
Natsume gapes up at her. “I— Ta— wha—” He glances between her and Tanuma.  
  
Tanuma, bless him, comes up beside her and takes Natsume’s face in his hands. “She’s right,” he says. “You disappearing won’t help any of us. We know we can’t always help as much as we’d like when it comes to yokai, but won’t you let us do what we can? Can’t you understand that we want to protect you as much as you want to protect us?”  
  
Natsume’s eyes fill with tears, but it doesn’t take a spell circle to see the longing in them, too. “I can’t ask that much of you.”  
  
“You can,” Taki insists. “You can ask us for just about anything. We _want_ you to ask. Just please don’t ask us to give you up.”  
  
“Unless,” Tanuma says, “you don’t want us—”  
  
“No,” Natsume blurts out, clutching at them both as if it wouldn’t take a hurricane to pull them away. “No, I— I do.” He swallows. “I want you, too. Please.”  
  
Taki smiles through her own tears. “Well, since you said please……”  
  
And he kisses Tanuma, then Taki again, and somehow losing her virginity with two boys at once is at least three times as awkward and fumbling as she’d expected her first time to be, especially when none of them can seem to stop crying. But there’ laughter, too, smiling and touching, and Taki can swear that by the end she can hear the water lapping at the edge of that invisible pond.  
  
Later, as they lay tangled together, Natsume says quietly, “I still have to go.”  
  
“And we can’t come with you.” It’s not a question.  
  
“No.” Natsume takes each of their hands in his, so gently. “I know it sounds like an excuse, but if I know that the people I love, that _you_ are all here, safe, then I think that will help me in what I have to do, more than anything else will.”  
  
“All right.” Taki wonders if this is how it feels to send a loved one off to war. “But you have to promise us that you will do everything in your power to come back.”  
  
“We’ll be here,” Tanuma adds, “so you have to come home to us, okay?”  
  
Natsume smiles. “Okay. I promise. I’ll do my best to come home.”  
  
Taki smiles back and kisses him. “We’ll be here,” she says, “but we won’t just be waiting.”  
  
“What will you be doing?”  
  
“Learning how to protect you.”  
  
As much as Taki treasures that night, she refuses to think of it as a final farewell, even when Natsume vanishes with hardly a word right after the graduation ceremony. She and Tanuma throw themselves into covering for Natsume (ostensibly on a post-graduation hiking trip), preparing for college, and making good on their promise to learn how to protect each other. Tanuma begins learning to focus his mind from his father, and Taki tracks down that Natori fellow and badgers him until he agrees to tell them both more about yokai and about the exorcist community. Taki finds herself surprisingly fascinated by the politics between exorcists, the alliances and power struggles. She might not be able to see spirits without a forbidden spell, but she can see humans, who could be just as much of a threat, and one that Natsume is much less equipped to deal with on his own.  
  
When Natsume finally reappears, tired but quietly triumphant, holding a sleepy Nyanko-sensei and a much thinner Book of Friends, Taki is studying politics and economics along with extracurricular mythology lessons, and more than ready to discover that homecoming sex is even more wonderful than farewell sex.  
  
Not that everything is easy after that. Accepting that there are limits to what they can help Natsume with doesn’t mean that they always agree on where those limits lie, and there are times when Natsume is not the only one of the trio who finds it safer to keep certain things to himself. And it takes work to keep a balance, to keep one of them from feeling left out, but on the whole, it works much better with all three of them. Taki and Tanuma can support each other when Natusme goes somewhere they can’t follow, and Natsume honestly finds reassurance in the fact that neither of them are wholly dependent on him for a reliability he can’t promise. And when the three of them present a united front— well, even Matoba learns to be respectfully cautious then.  
  
People in town may trade knowing looks about the Tanuma family’s “friend” who stays with them when not traveling for some vague freelance job, and how one of their sons has Tanuma’s nose while the other one has Natsume’s eyes. (None of them can explain how the daughter seemed to have both— except those who were familiar with spirits, and knew how even well-meaning ones had some rather odd ideas of favors…) The Tanumas and Natsume are unfailingly kind and helpful, though, so their neighbors mostly overlook their various oddities.  
  
The Fujiwaras are delighted to consider them all part of the family, and touched that Natsume trusts them with this secret (which eases the sting when they finally learn what he _had_ been hiding from them all these years, but that’s another story).  
  
Legally they may be called the Tanuma family (and friends), but when a spirit or exorcist comes to them for a favor, or a name, or even a threat, they always ask, “Is this the house of the Natsume clan?”  
  
And every one of them proudly says, “It is.”


End file.
